The Storm at the Door
Page 12
Lowell has had two weeks straight of down days, his attendance at meals and group therapy requiring no small effort by the Crew Crew, as the great poet pleads with them to be left to his horizontal despair and recites his work: I myself am Hell; / nobody’s here.
Even Marvin, on whom the patients and staff of Mayflower—indeed the psychiatric community at large—have been able to depend for a grand theater of psychosis, appears entirely to have taken up his seemingly final role, Marvin Foulds the Depressive. Marvin’s face has lost the theatricality that had animated it, and now he simply lets himself be ushered from appointment to appointment. No longer any of his strange personae, he often seems no one at all.
• • •
In the grim afternoon quiet of Upshire Hall, my grandfather nears the end of his thrice-weekly one-on-one with Canon. Though Frederick immediately agreed to Canon’s offer to make him one of Mayflower’s case studies, he remained guarded and largely uncooperative for the first two or three weeks. It wasn’t until Canon, stalemated in the fourth week of therapy, began to delineate what Frederick needed to do to leave that Frederick began to yield, and Canon learned how to render his rigid, angry patient malleable.
Usually, Canon tries not to discuss the prospect of leaving with patients. He wants them to see their goal not as a return to their old life, but as recovery. Recovery from the affliction that brought them to this place the high accomplishment, freedom a lovely subsidiary benefit. But with Frederick, Canon learned he needed to modify his rule, dangling freedom as the carrot on a stick. It helped that, in Frederick Merrill’s case, Canon’s power in this regard is near absolute; Canon unsubtly reaffirmed to his patient that only his professional judgment would set him free, that Frederick must achieve what Canon wants for him before Frederick can achieve what it is that he wants for himself. Surreptitiously, within this crude behaviorist scheme, the psychiatrist will heal his patient.
Nothing else in there you’d like to share? Canon asks, gesturing to the journal he makes Frederick bring to him each session, the record of Frederick’s thoughts between meetings that Canon repeatedly requests to read, without success.
Mostly, it’s just nonsense, Frederick says with a shrug. Trying to find the right way to say things.
Canon shrugs too.
You know, Canon says now, as the session wraps up, as he says at the end of nearly every session, I think we are really starting to get somewhere.
Frederick watches the soft rain mystify the window’s view of the Depression, then turns to Canon.
Ballpark estimate, Frederick says, trying to muster an ingratiating laugh.
All depends on you, of course. But it looks to me like you’ll be home by Christmas.
Frederick nods. He tells himself that next time in both group therapy and in one-on-one he must try harder, not for legitimate breakthrough but to emulate the language of the sort of breakthrough Canon would accept. Frederick knows Canon has offered him no new insight. He has merely repeated Wallace’s glib insights, has merely piled onto Frederick the uninspired secondhand notions all those psychiatrists are shoveling in their trench-digging universities. Silently, and in his journals, Frederick continues to know Canon is deluded, though perhaps he applies language less severe than before—moronic ideologue downgraded to foolish pedant.
These sessions with Canon, now that he has managed to subdue his animosity in the service of his liberation, are not entirely unpleasant. It is something of a challenge, like a brainteaser, trying to limn Canon’s questions and responses for precisely the optimal reply. The subtextual goal, freedom, singular but rarely spoken; each word measured for its success or failure in obtaining what Frederick desires. It is not unlike seducing a reluctant young woman.
Okay, you’re free to go back to your room. Progress, Mr. Merrill. Real progress.
Frederick nods again.
2
As the Crew Crew kid escorts him across the Depression, Frederick tries to formulate the exact language of his breakthrough, the paragraph that will explain, in Canon’s view, the entirety of Frederick’s existential dilemma. What I need, Frederick will say, is to understand that I am always trying to replace the love and approval my mother never gave me with other forms of love and approval. My affairs have been an obvious manifestation of this, as has been my difficulty when things at work do not go as well as I hope. I must, over time, with the love of my family, come to understand my value does not depend upon others. I love myself! Sunshine and rainbows!
Frederick understands well this line of half-logic and the conclusions to which it aspires. He even finds fragments of truth in the argument, from time to time. But he still privately mocks its naïveté, its almost sweetly simple view of the human condition. There is a chaos within himself, Frederick acknowledges. But a mental hospital is not now, nor will it ever be, the place he belongs. Maybe somewhere just at the periphery of his awareness, that place terrible with beauty he sometimes reaches in his excitement, when ideas come so quickly, Frederick might find a way to account for himself. There he might find words for everything, a way to explain to Katharine, his girls, to himself why some days the world seems to him simple, tangible, even compliant to his will, while at other times the sadness of average things—a pain in his stomach, Katharine’s failure to coddle him, no dessert in the freezer, clocks persisting in their counting of seconds—makes him consider his end. And why everything that has seemed to promise transformation—his career, patent ideas, countless first chapters and stray lines of poetry, and, more than any, the way Katharine and he were together when they first began—could never, in the end, be enough. Almost none of this, his true affliction, has to do with the cozy Freudian theater of his early childhood with his mother. But Frederick knows that, if he tried to explain to Canon how his true tumult was incompatible with those simple Freudian scenarios, Canon would understand it as simple resistance to therapy, a major setback.
The only one to whom Frederick acknowledges these thoughts is the night assistant Rita, of whom all the men of Ingersoll are fond, with whom Frederick has developed a particular closeness. It has grown, Frederick believes, not as nurse and patient, not as counselor and counselee, but as real friendship. Rita and Frederick now invariably find a half an hour or more to talk during her nightly shift. And often it is she who talks, telling Frederick what the rest of the staff would not dare tell patients: intimate descriptions of her education and family, a full account of world news, not the filtered version they receive through the common room TV. Rita even shares with Frederick the details of her failed attempts to date and love boys. And in exchange, Frederick has begun, in the last two weeks or so, to speak his mind as simply as possible, without the dissemblance he must use with Canon, even with the other men on Ingersoll.
I don’t know, he told her just last night. Sometimes, everything seems fine. Everything seems normal, which isn’t normal at all. And then, all of a sudden, something switches. It could be the smallest thing. I could drink too much and yell at one of the girls. Or maybe Katharine gets fed up with me and makes me sleep in the guest room. Or maybe nothing at all happens. Maybe there isn’t any reason at all. Anyway, all of a sudden, it’s like a trapdoor. A hidden door. Like Alice into Wonderland, you know? But the opposite of Wonderland. Horrorland.
And though Frederick knows Canon brought Rita with him from Harvard, Frederick never suspects that these conversations are what some of the other (likely jealous) men of Ingersoll suggest they are: Rita’s surreptitious ruse to collect that madhouse currency—his true thoughts, his internal life—to sell to Canon in exchange for respect, or promotion. Frederick simply trusts her. It is friendship, perhaps generated like many—or so Frederick likes to think—from an unspoken romantic dynamic.
The puzzle of trying to satisfy Canon, the possibility of release, and the conversations with Rita: that is all that has made each day of the last weeks bearable.
Frederick and the Crew Crew kid have passed the first doors of Ingersoll when
a panic seizes Frederick. He feels his pockets, reflexively, but knows it is not in his pockets. He has left his journal.
Frederick’s journal: written with his skepticism, his disavowals of Canon’s notions, his outright contempt, and—worst of all—his true confusion, of which he speaks only to Rita. If Canon reads it, Frederick knows, it will mean the undoing of the last weeks of effort. It will require months, if not years, for Frederick to convince Canon that he does not believe the words he has written there.
Shit, Frederick says to the Crew Crew boy. Shit. I need to go back.
Excuse me?
I left something at Canon’s office.
Left something?
My journal. I need it back. I need to go back.
You can get it tomorrow.
No, I need it now.
Tough luck, pal. Tomorrow.
At moments of dramatic necessity, where others falter, the right words often come to Frederick. As simply as a cogent argument suddenly constructs itself in a teary-eyed, whiskey-soaked dispute with Katharine, a simple lie now assembles itself in the void of necessity the moment opens.
Dr. Canon told me I have to list my dreams each morning, and then compare them with the morning before. If I can’t do that tomorrow morning, I’ll have to explain to him why I couldn’t. Why I wasn’t allowed to get my journal back.
The older generation of orderlies and nurses would certainly have seen through this obvious lie, would have denied Frederick a return to Canon’s office, if not out of deference to the psychiatrist in chief then simply to remind Frederick that it was they, not he, who held authority. But the Crew Crew boy, relatively unschooled in the deceptions of patients, now has a dilemma: protocol, Canon’s holy scripture, must be violated one way or the other. Either Canon’s patient will make an unscheduled return or the patient will be unable to complete the work Canon has assigned him. The Crew Crew boy knows, from a dozen staff meetings, the importance to Canon of Frederick’s position in the selective lot of Canon’s case studies, and so he imagines greater punishment for the violation of the latter order than for the former. The Crew Crew boy tells Frederick that he is a pain in the ass and checks his watch.
All right, he says. But you are the one who’s going to have to go in there and ask him for it.
3
Frederick has found the door to Canon’s office unlatched, but there is darkness within. The Crew Crew kid is waiting in reception, hoping to avoid the confrontation with Canon he senses would follow, which he senses likely will come anyway. Frederick thinks that he is too late, that Canon has already gone home, journal in hand, to spend the evening reading. Frederick already begins to try to comprehend the horror of it, to measure the immeasurable repercussions. But it is, like what its entries fail to describe, impossible to fathom all at once.
Frederick knocks lightly at the door, pushes it open the rest of the way. A step into the room, the floor gives way, depths open. At first he thinks, instinctively, Burglars! Two bodies flung into frantic motion at the far corner of the room, skittering in the illegible darkness. Frederick expects a blow or a bullet to come, his flesh tingles to receive the first strike, until one of the bodies speaks with Canon’s voice.
Get out. Get out of here? Canon’s voice says, more a question than a command.
Sorry, sorry, Frederick says instinctively, but he does not turn to the door, not immediately. The need to recover his journal is just as urgent as the need to flee. He does not consciously make the decision; his body simply walks the five creaking steps toward the chair in which he chooses to spend his sessions—the divan seems laughably cliché—and he grasps for the journal, which, he is blissful to find, still remains on the side table.
Get out. Now a command.
Frederick has little time to consider as he obeys, scrambling to the light cast from reception. Still, he is able to think: his wife? A lover? Both seem impossible. Frederick is on the door’s other side now, but he turns to pull it shut. And it is there, in the last backward glance, aided by the Sahara-bright fluorescents Canon had installed in the corridor, that Frederick sees her face, rising from behind Canon’s bare back. Her face, which reflects the incredulousness of Frederick’s. Suddenly, a trapdoor can swing open. Rita.
4
Fire. The white and blue and red of fire. Nothing, now, other than fire. No avid squirrels, no ticking clocks, no history, no Katharine, no daughters, no failure, no aspirations or accomplishments. No demands from history or future; no confusion of the present. Only the obliterating conflagration. For the moment, there is no Frederick.
Electroconvulsive therapy: the last vestige of the post-Victorian half-science of the kind Canon has been so proud to eliminate. Or nearly eliminate. Talk therapy and the social milieu are paramount, but Canon is able to remind himself that a scientist must not let his own preferred approach suppress undeniable data, and the truth is electroshock can yield good numbers. It is hard to know why, precisely, and it is Canon’s belief that it has to do not with an electrical realignment but with trauma. A synthesized, electric version of one’s childhood trauma, which shocks into the consciousness that which has remained deeply subconscious. Not to be used, except in the most severe cases. Only three times has he instructed Higgins, now the only one at the hospital proficient with this primitive device: once a boy in North Webster, once a schizotypal woman in South House who wouldn’t stop bruising herself, and now Frederick Merrill.
After Canon and Rita had scrambled back to their clothes, to their offices, Canon had acted on impulse, without deeper consideration. The important thing, he knew, was containment. As soon as he had collected himself enough to speak, Canon made the call.
Frederick had been back in his room in Ingersoll for less than fifteen minutes when Higgins arrived. The orderly who had escorted Frederick did not know what his patient had seen, but he gleaned from the tremor in Frederick’s gait that something grave had occurred. The boy had already begun to practice the speech to his parents and his girlfriend, explaining why he had lost his first real job.
Higgins, a nervous man who seems never to know quite what to do with his hands, is always grateful for any direct task ordered by Canon. And so Higgins had come, emboldened with delegated purpose, to the worried orderly, and had greatly relieved the boy to inform him Canon had called for an emergency course of ECT, in response to the deeply disturbing behavior Frederick had displayed in their session.
The orderly, with the help of the other Crew Crew boy just finishing his shift, pulled Frederick down the corridor just as had the orderlies they had seen in movies, by the elbows to subdue his fight. Frederick, however, had no fight. He wanted, at that moment, only to capitulate, to promise, to be left to silence. When they reached the room, with all its restraints and devices shaped to interface with the human form in those dreadful, inhuman ways, Frederick voided his bladder.
• • •
The shock has stopped, carrying memory away with it. When Frederick wakes from the sedatives, an hour later, he feels that something has entered him and scooped him out with brute force, replacing what was him with a fluctuating, mindless static. The internal dislocation overwhelms the external. The questions at first are more of who than where. It is only after Canon enters the door to the little white room, admitting the fluorescents from the hallway, that Frederick begins to remember himself, and then to understand his place.
He is a patient at a mental hospital called Mayflower. He is in the concrete building that holds the most problematic, those who must be separated from the rest. This is his psychiatrist, Canon, who has done something. What? Something that is related to the part of him that has been scooped away, a part of him that is perhaps benign or perhaps malignant, but absolutely crucial.
How are you feeling? Canon asks.
I don’t feel—Frederick begins, but can’t complete the sentence: words, too, seem to have been replaced with this dull fizzling of calming electricity. But, then, perhaps this answer is accurate.
Do you remember, Canon begins, and begins again. Do you remember what happened to you?
What happened to me, Frederick echoes.
You’ve been given electroconvulsive therapy. It’s normal not to remember.
Electro—
It’s a radical approach, only for the most extreme cases.
Frederick turns back to the doctor. No, it is not an accusation, that strange new aspect of Canon’s face, nor is it a question exactly. It is, rather, something Frederick has not seen before. In the expectancy of Canon’s eyes, the fitful stroking of goatee, the sucking of bottom lip, it is uncertainty.
Rita. Frederick remembers now, his muddled awareness clarifying into the memory of her face, caught in the fluorescent hallway light.
Again and again, Frederick will later scrutinize this conversation, will spend days dwelling within it, feeling out its possible alternatives, what he might have said that might have yielded better ends. Uncertainty: was there some way he could have used it against Canon? If Frederick had threatened instead of cowered, could he have blackmailed his way to freedom? But, no. His instincts in this moment, Frederick will later conclude, were immaculately adroit. He had been the only witness, after all; who would believe him?
I remember now, Frederick says.
You remember—Canon begins. You know why I had no choice but this terrible electroshock treatment?